


definitely safe forever

by windingwoods



Category: Hiveswap, Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Pokemon Fusion, F/F, Fallers, Found Families, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, POV Multiple
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-20
Updated: 2018-02-20
Packaged: 2019-03-21 20:35:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,523
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13748760
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/windingwoods/pseuds/windingwoods
Summary: Drifloon: These Pokémon are called the "Signpost for Wandering Spirits." Children holding them sometimes vanish.Or, two children fall down a rabbit hole.





	definitely safe forever

**Author's Note:**

> welcome to my pkmn au where pkmn are only mostly mentioned in passing because i actually just wanted to have an excuse to give joey and jude an actual, not absentee family. thx alola for that sweet worldbuilding.  
> anyway this got kind of personal from time to time so mind the tags etc etc, enjoy!

i. ASSAULT

 

Her feet make no sound as she clambers from root to root, careful not to slip and have any unfortunate boot-meet-water situation: wet socks might not be on top of her shitlist but they’re pretty damn close. To think her town used to be on _land_.

She checks the pokegrub blinking coordinates on her wrist and can see Dirk doing the same from the corner of her eye, the line of his jaw shifting just barely as every little muscle and tendon in his body get ready to fight. Roxy can’t wait to be done with today already, sit him down for a cup of roserade tea and watch as the tension slips down his shoulders. They can’t do that just yet, though, so she whispers, “we should be close.”

Dirk nods, taps on one of the pokeballs hanging from his belt to bring out his weavile. Roxy does the same with Mutie.

She can already hear it, the otherworldly buzz of a portal stabbing through the soft fabric of space and time that keeps their universe separated from all the infinite others, as it _should_ be, and her fingerless gloves dig into the skin of her knuckles as she balls her hands into fists. Whatever, she and Dirk can take any crazed Ultra Beast ready to throw itself at them on this fine day.

They can keep the town safe.

Dirk’s hand is on her arm for a brief second, right before stepping around a mangrove trunk. Both their pokegrubs light up then, the sign that they’ve arrived, finally, and Roxy blinks as her eyes adjust to the harsh blue light of the portal. She’s ready and she knows Mutie’s too, except there’s no big baddie in sight. Nestled together in a crooked mass of mangrove roots, afraid and shivering and looking up with two sets of eyes wide as saucepans, are two most certainly not Ultra Beast-y human children.

“Mother of _fuck_ ,” she breathes out.

“Uh, langage, Rox.”

 

 

ii. we shall go together

 

Reality is kind of a blur for Joey Claire at the moment. There’s something warm under her squashed cheek (sunburnt skin, some freckles, the guy called… Dirk? Dirk, yeah, he’s carrying her), something weighing down her pocket (Tesseract’s pokeball, he should be inside, she hopes he is inside) and a lot of green and blue blending together as her eyes fail to focus on anything at all. She doesn’t know where she is, doesn’t know where these people are taking her and Jude, and it’s scary but— but she’s so, so tired all of sudden.

“We’re here,” whispers a voice in her ear as something awkwardly pats her head and Joey glances up to see what looks like a two-story house. There’s a painted drifloon panel hanging above the door, which is pretty goofy, but she doesn’t get to comment on it because her head spins itself to a stop and everything goes dark.

When she opens her eyes again she’s sinking into something soft that smells nice; she blinks up at what she thinks might be a ceiling and turns her head when she hears a creaking noise from nearby. That’s when it clicks that the soft thing around her is a bed and that Jude’s sitting on the edge of it, his pidove perched on his shoulder in a mess of ruffled up feathers.

“Wakey wakey,” murmurs a girl Joey’s hazy memories classify as the one named Roxy. Maybe. “You feelin’ okay?”

She’s handing her a glass of water and Joey realizes she must have let Tesseract out because he’s currently pressed against Roxy’s legs, sniffing at her shoes with a passion and wagging his tail. Whoever said stoutland make loyal bodyguards didn’t know what they were talking about.

Still, she accepts the glass. “Where are we?” she asks after downing half of it in one go, licking at her lips as some of the water trickles down her chin. She sure was thirsty, huh.

Roxy’s face cracks for a second, whatever problem at hand quickly swept under the rug before anyone could notice. Anyone but a six-year-old child used to asking others questions they don’t know how to answer, that is, and Joey is all too good at that. Next to her Jude fidgets, so she holds his clammy hand.

“We’re at the Drifloon Cottage, dear,” Roxy seems to settle for in the end, a sugary smile in place that makes every alarm bell in Joey’s brain go off at the same time. “You’re safe here.”

“Sounds fake,” Joey says, which makes Jude snap his head towards her with a panicked “Joey!” at the same time as someone else in the room snorts. Every head, including Joey’s, turns to a boy sitting on the couch with his legs crossed, right next to a girl who looks a lot like Roxy, only less concerned with making things more reassuring.

“Uh,” the boy says before Joey can comment on just what bedroom-living room hybrid have they put her in and why, “sorry. Kid’s a funny one.”

There’s a displeased choir of “Dave”s that fades as soon as someone else walks into the room. It’s another girl, short and clumsy-looking and with the biggest, brightest green eyes Joey’s ever seen.

The girl runs a hand through her frizzy white hair. “The readings have confirmed what we thought, these two do come from another…” Her voice peters out when her stare lands on the bed. “Oh. Oh, gosh. Uh, good morning?”

“Good morning,” answers Jude, and Joey wants to tackle him for fraternizing with the enemy. “Are you guys aliens?”

For a moment the world goes quiet, almost still for the exception of Tesseract’s incessant sniffing, then Roxy whispers, “we’re _laliens_.”

The girl who looks like her throws a cushion at the back of her head.

 

 

iii. beatup

 

“So,” Jade repeats for the fourth time since she and Jake have come back from their latest glorified recon job (yes, yes, he’s supposed to call them _adventures_ , he’s been told for years already thank you very much, Jade), “we’ve got two Fallers under our roof now. Two whole infant F—”

Dave can’t take one more second of this.

“Arceus’ sick rhymes, yes! Yes, there’s two fucking alien babies and _yes_ , they’re here to stay because we might have a bunch of braniac assholes under our collective belt— no offense, Rose, I love you, but we don’t know how to send them back to whatever alternative universe they come from!” He sucks in a breath. “Also they’re adorable.”

“None taken,” says Rose, belatedly, once he’s finished rambling, and taps her fingers on his temple in an absent-minded fashion, which is really standard Rose protocol actually. She’s squeezed by Dave’s right side onto one of their oldest, most hazardous couches, while Jade’s sprawled at his left. He feels pretty damn enveloped in girls at the moment, fresh out of some high quality magazine with coated paper and all. Steven Stone, eat your heart out.

Jade rumbles against him, presses a bit more into his ribs as she sighs, loud and pensive enough she could join the braniac assholes club and challenge Dirk for his Misplaced Jock primacy. Dave wonders which would the preferred method to assert dominance be: arm wrestling or a good ol’ pokemon battle?

“I bet Uncle’s hair went white when you told him,” Jade’s saying now, cutting his train of thought off in cold blood. Some real Murder on the Johto Express shit right there. “He already worries so much about all of us, and now we’re raising toddlers?”

“I believe Jude to be older than thirty-six months,” Rose muses, “and Joey has already established her role as the elder sister, many times. _Vocally_.”

“Yeah, man, tell me all about vocal elder sis— oof, Rose, that hurt!”

Rose clicks her tongue. “What I was getting at before my lovable brother’s interruption is that they’re not toddlers, Jade. Don’t roll your eyes at me, you know I’m right. Also, half the population of this town is composed of Fallers, need I remind you that?”

Yet another pointy limb digs into Dave as Jade props herself up to a better sitting position, most likely about to argue with that but then thinking better of it. He can’t fault her for that.

“Two more people to look after,” she murmurs in the end. Her eyebrows draw together under the same weight Dave’s been sharing with her since she and Jake found him and Dirk in the middle of nowhere so he reaches out to smooth it out of her face, at least for now, at least for a little bit.

She leans into the touch of his hand, he breathes. They’ve got this.

 

 

iv. green ghost

 

Out of all the things he could be stuck doing at the moment, John muses babysitting duty might not be the bottom of the barrel, especially considering how much he’s been itching to get to know the kids better since the whole Two New Fallers bomb was dropped at his feet like something the meowth dragged in by a rather unceremonious Roxy. It hadn’t been nice to notice the tiredness in her.

There’s a sweet smell coming from the kitchen, the sign Dad’s baking up the next apocalypse (he should be careful not to say that out loud, apocalypse is kind of a loaded word in their little, rattled town), and John forces down the ghost feeling of his impending heartburn, focusing on the task at hand instead. That is, trying not to miserably lose at pogs against a four-year-old boy.

“This is totally bogus,” he says, maybe in kind of a petulant way unworthy of a good babysitter, as Jude topples over a bunch of the pogs he’s lent John just to win them all back humiliatingly fast. Next to them, sprawled on the pavement like a washed up staryu and staring upward in utter dismay, Joey lets out a long, drawled out groan. One of the pogs that have just gone flying lands square on her face.

“This,” she starts after a chilling moment of silence. She picks the pog up with two fingers like it could carry some deadly disease. “Really _blows_.”

“Uh, I’m… sorry?”

His valiant attempt at reconciliation flies right over her head as she barrels on. “Of all the things! Of all the things he could’ve had with him when we got sucked into that portal it had to be the pogs!” Her voice clenches with the intensity and anger only a child that small could ever harbor for small cardboard discs. “A flashlight full of pogs! Who _does_ that?”

“Now, let’s all just—” John tries again, gets cut off by Jude yelling, “you only had Tesseract’s pokeball with you!”

“Tesseract’s more important than a bunch of stupid pogs!”

Joey’s face screws up in regret as soon as she’s done yelling that, and she shoots up from her lying position so fast she must have given herself whiplash but she still stretches her arms toward Jude, as if trying to get her words back. “I’m… I’m sorry, Jude, I didn’t mean—”

“Mom gave them to me,” Jude whispers. He’s not facing him, but John can see him curling up as his voice quivers, small and lost and a world away from everything he’s ever called home.

Joey’s eyes are getting watery too and maybe it’s because of all the little details in her and Jude that remind John of his own family for some reason, how sometimes these two alien kids look so much like Jade and Jake and even John himself it’s startling, but he can’t just sit and watch. So, because he can’t, he grabs an armful of each one and pulls them flushed against him, wrapping himself around them as much as he can, as tight as he knows it’ll ground them but won’t hurt them; his friends have turned him into an expert in the field.

“It’s okay to be upset,” he murmurs into black curls that smell like Rose’s favorite shampoo. “The upset pile doesn’t stop from getting taller.”

Somewhere in the snot central that’s becoming his shirt Joey laughs in between her choked up sobs. He’ll need to thank Dave later, he figures.

For now though he just sighs, rubs his hands in circles over her and Jude’s backs until the sniffling quiets down. By the time Dad pokes his head inside the room, carrying fatherly concern in the form of a tray of cookies, the kids have dozed off.

 

 

v. reverie

 

The blue hue of the many monitors staring back at her is starting to get just a little bit unnerving, to be perfectly honest. Calliope figures that’s bound to happen after spending what feels like an eternity sitting in front of the cold, unfeeling technology her brother and his team of mad scientists used to pretty much sink their town into a cosmic water wasteland, tearing through its space-time fabric with such violence the wounds have yet to scab over and stop oozing angry, exiled creatures with no way back. And people, of course.

Calliope had hoped they were done with the people after the first time, after their sunken town had accepted so many of them in one go, but things hardly ever comply to her desires. Which is probably also why she’s been working her brain into incoherent, sluggish soup for months trying to, well, pin some feeble readings down in hope of them shining the way home to whichever world Joey and Jude come from.

“Callie dearest,” chimes a voice she’s learnt to lean into like a lullaby, a life raft, and Calliope’s attention snaps from the endless stream of calculations to Roxy. Her wavy hair glows like a dim halo in the artificial light of the monitors and not for the first time (or the last) Calliope’s heart does a little twirl in her ribcage.

“You haven’t come out of there in a while,” Roxy says, soft with concern. “Y’know Jude thinks you’re this super hacker all holed up here in the sticks stealin’ the government’s deepest secrets or something. Boy has quite the fervid imagination, gotta say.”

“That’d be more like your scene, though, I believe?” Calliope parries; it makes Roxy laugh loud enough for her umbreon to look up at her in confusion. It’s got a real nice ring to it, her laughter.

“Hell _yes_ , babe. Looks like you’re dating the bee’s knees of the hacking industry, not to mention the second hottest thing out here. The first’s Jane by the way, whom you’re _also_ dating!” Roxy wolf-whistles, seemingly ignoring the way Calliope’s cheeks are turning ruddy. Thank goodness. “Looks like you’ve won the girlfriends bingo, huh.”

She’s looking down at her now, so much softer Calliope can feel the tension clenching her nape like a liepard mother with her offspring dissipate, almost as if it had never been there in the first place.

“But then again, so have I,” comes Roxy’s voice and she’s almost bashful about it, if bashful is something Roxanne Lalonde could ever be. After years of handing pieces of their hearts to each other it’s still mind boggling to even think about it, how Calliope of all people gets to see her like this.

“Would you come with me to Jane’s place?” she asks. Roxy’s answer is a smile so wide it must hurt her cheeks.

 

 

vi. whistling jackhammer

 

“Dirk, look!” Joey’s voice rings brightly through the air from where she’s crouched down in front of a freshly weaned mareep in what could only be described as utter adoration. “It’s so fluffy! Ah, it licked my hand!”

He shifts his weight from one foot to the other. “Is that… safe?”

Next to him Jane gives him a somewhat level look, but before he can panic and use all his verbal prowess to kick himself in the teeth as hard as she sees fit, the look softens. “We brush all our mareep and flaaffy thoroughly, every day,” she explains with practiced patience. “So yes, it is indeed safe and our precious child isn’t in any imminent danger of getting electrocuted. You can stop frowning, Dirk.”

“Wasn’t frowning, Janey.”

“Were too.”

“Was n— actually, we’re not doing this. Not on our precious child’s seventh birthday.”

That seems to settle it, at least for the moment. They both keep their eyes trained on Joey as she rubs her face against the mareep’s snout and laughs like it’s the best thing she’s ever experienced from the height of her seven years of life; Dirk takes a tentative sip of miltank milk from his cup.

A part of him wants to ask Jane just what does she feed her pokemon, to diffuse the subtle tension that’s been crackling in between the two of them since he and Joey arrived, but he swallows it down. He knows better than trying to hornswoggle her, _especially_ when mad.

“Does it hurt anywhere?” Jane asks, voice low so that Joey won’t hear them, and it sounds more somber than it does angry.

Dirk considers it in earnest: the gash on his cheek itches a whole fresh hell and his left arm still feels somewhat sore from where the Ultra Beast sent him slamming against a tree, but he’s feeling way better than he did a couple days ago already.

“I’m alright,” he says, just a tad bit curtly. “You’re quite the miracle worker, Crocker.”

Usually she would giggle at that, maybe laugh out loud if Dirk’s lucky, and shove him with a half-hearted “aw, shucks” or some complaint about Striders being such sweet talkers. This time she stays silent for a moment that feels almost unending to him, then she says, “why didn’t you take anyone with you?”

There it is, the other shoe.

“They were all busy—”

“Dave wasn’t.”

“ _Dave_ ,” Dirk starts, has to stop himself when the words twist and writhe in his throat. He takes a deep breath, hoping the bile won’t spill. “Would be better off going on adventures with Jade. Somewhere far away from here, preferably.”

When he risks a glance at Jane she’s frowning, but there’s honest concern written all over her face, something like deep-seated fury that’s dulled into sadness in the line of her mouth. She looks like she wants to argue even as she presses her lips together in silence, an invitation for Dirk to continue.

He can’t but take it. “The more I look at myself in the mirror, the more alike we look, Janey.”

Thankfully, she doesn’t ask who. She knows he’s not talking about himself and Dave.

“I’m growing up into this goddamned carbon copy of him, I even have the same shitty shades, I… I don’t want to remind Dave of that, of all things.”

His mug feels heavier in his hands all of sudden, the smell of milk strong enough it makes him queasy. He takes a deep breath, like Jake taught him back when he’d confessed Dirk just how madly afraid he got sometimes, holding on to both of his hands. It’s not like he can bolt away from this conversation just yet anyway, he wants to be there when Jane will tell Joey she can have that mareep if she promises to take good care of it.

“What about Rose, then?” Jane asks, properly looking at him this time. “You have no problem with her being near Dave and yet she looks so much like you I assume she must resemble that… maggot, too. At least in part.”

Were this a different conversation he’d laugh at her pristine, certified cuss-free vocabulary and they’d descend into easy banter from there. Were this a different conversation he wouldn’t be feeling so choked up.

“C’mon,” he tries weakly, already knowing she’s right but. But, she also quite isn’t. “I can’t get in the way of their estranged siblings reunion. That’s some fated agnition shit right there, it’s different.”

Jane exhales through her nose, loud and deliberate, and it takes all the years of having known her for Dirk not to flinch. _Disapproval doesn’t equate retaliation_ , Rose’s voice recites in his head, with endless calm.

There’s the same calm in Jane’s words when she says, “Dave loves you so much it makes me feel like the rest of us are intruding sometimes. You should— you should take better care yourself.”

Then, without giving him the time to respond, or even to process, to try to make sense of what she’s just said, she claps her hands.  
“Joey, dear, I’ve got a little something to tell you!”

 

 

vii. lilith in starlight

 

There are three whole pins in Kanaya’s mouth at the moment, clutched precariously in between her lips, but that doesn’t seem to have deterred Rose from asking her a rather important question. She takes one pin out to jab it where the hems of the fabric of the skirt she’s working on are meant to connect, securing it around Rose’s waist for the time being, and stabs the other two back into the cushion.

“You asked if I miss contests?” She’s stalling, without even being subtle about it, but by the way Rose’s whole body shifts as Kanaya looks up at her face from where she’s kneeling in front of her she wagers it shouldn’t earn her any snarky reply. Seems good.

Above her Rose nods. Her whole face exudes self-consciousness (wrinkled nose, frown lines in between her eyebrows, the way she can’t seem to look down) as she mumbles, “you said you used to be a big name in the circuit before, well…” A vague gesture of her hands. “Falling.”

Kanaya allows herself one moment to behold how the fear of upsetting her is enough to make Rose lose her eloquence, dimly aware that she must be gawking, then smiles. “Those were good days, yes.”

She lets one of her hands curl around Rose’s knee, drags her fingernails on the soft skin of the back in what she hopes to be a reassuring gesture. When Rose visibly relaxes she continues, “I would be lying if I said I didn’t miss them, but the days I’ve been spending here have been just as good to me. Just, differently.”

Now Rose’s looking at her, eyes bright, and she does that little shrug of her shoulders she always does when she wants to downplay her own smugness as she says, “why, Kanaya, I should hope so.”

The pink on her cheeks doesn’t linger long, though, and Kanaya lets the seconds tick by in silence as she waits for Rose to work through whatever it is that needs to be said. She resists the urge to straighten up when she hears the telltale sound of someone sucking in a breath.

“Joey saw some Master Rank performance on TV the other day and now she won’t shut up about it,” Rose says, and the fondness in her voice shines even as she wrings her hands like she’s walking on eggshells. “So I was wondering, since you’re here and all, if you could, uh, give her some pointers?”

She stops torturing her own hands only to press both palms against her face as she groans, a rare display of Lalonde distress Kanaya considers herself lucky to even witness. Kind of like a meteor shower. “This sounded so much _smoother_ in my head! ‘Since you’re here and all’? Really, Rose, really?”

“Um—”

“Go ahead, by all means. Laugh at me, I deserve but endless scorn and rotten vegetables thrown at my graceless persona for this blunder.”

To her credit, Kanaya doesn’t laugh, not even a little giggle. Instead, she gives Rose’s leg a gentle squeeze and, when Rose’s eyes fly right back to hers, nods in what she hopes won’t be taken for endorsement of any self-inflicted rotten vegetables pelting.

“I’d be honored to teach her,” she says. It earns her a smile so bright she almost looks away. “I gave up on contests after Falling, but I decided to stay here of my own volition, like many others. This is the least I can do to thank you for keeping us all safe.”

She thinks of Terezi’s mother, who Fell together with her daughter and waited until she had grown up to apply for a place in the Elite Four. They call her Redglare across the region but she’s Latula Pyrope when she visits, silly and loud and living a life away from home Kanaya could never put herself through, not if it means leaving everything else behind.

Before Rose can launch herself into a tirade about how she’s merely following in her own mother’s legacy and how that alone nullifies anything the townspeople could ever owe her, Kanaya stands up abruptly, both hands now on Rose’s waist as she pulls her closer, careful not to jostle the skirt.

“Let me do this for you?”

It comes out as a question but it’s enough to leave Rose dumbfounded. Watching as she blinks up at her is enough for Kanaya to feel pretty satisfied with herself, but then Rose leans forward, fingers ghosting over Kanaya’s shoulders as she whispers, “do _what_ , now?” and, well, she guesses the talking can wait.

 

 

viii. everything is something to somebody

 

Roxy can’t tell what’s making it harder to breathe between Jude curled up on her lap, the sheer heat radiating from Tesseract as they both sink into his fur or the crushing existential guilt that comes from knowing she’s a selfish pile of garbage not even a starved muk would ever consider worth its while. There’s no sugarcoating how damn _elated_ she felt earlier when Calliope broke the Big News to her and the others: it has been now deemed officially impossible to send the kids back to their original world, or universe, or timeline. Too much time has passed and the quantic trail of breadcrumbs has all been gobbled up by space-time murkrow; scientifically speaking, shit’s fucked.

Which, in theory, should be a bad thing, because they’ve been trying to fix this for longer than Roxy can be bothered counting and yet there she is, throwing a private party in the backroom of her brain because impossible means she won’t have to part from the sleepy boy in her arms who’s reading his favorite book out loud to her. Maybe Dirk had been right about raising two children not sounding like the best idea, but Roxy can’t quite bring herself to regret it either.

Once again, she’s the literal worst.

“Roxy?” Jude’s voice snaps her out of her little self-hatred bubble and back in the realm of reality. He’s closed the book, not before placing one of his several bookmarks in between the pages (there’s about a dozen of them, all meant to be different reminders), and he’s now looking up at her from above his shoulder as he twists and shifts against her. He’s got his trademark curious face on.

“What’s up, squirt?” she asks back, bites down on her lower lip not to smile too wide when the nickname makes him frown.

“I was _wondering_ ,” Jude carries on, surprising her with his vocabulary not for the first time. Bookworm kids, man. “Why’s this place called Drifloon Cottage? I mean, the sing is nice if a bit crude but, like, why’s that?”

_A bit crude_ , parrots Roxy’s mind in disbelief. She shushes it.

“Well, you see, when a boy and a girl both love being pretentious about their sh— erm, crappy situation very much sometimes they sit down to make a wooden sign and name their whole house after it,” she explains, maybe a bit too vaguely judging by the confused stare Jude’s giving her. Okay, new approach. “Dirk and I made the sign.”

That seems to be more like it, because Jude’s eyes widen almost comically behind his glasses. The boy really does look an awful lot like Jake sometimes, which only makes him cuter to Roxy.

She starts with the second part of the explanation. “We picked drifloon because, y’know, we were both edgy kids and drifloon’s all about lost children and stuff? I was stuck living with a friend and my baby sister with all these new, scary responsibilities after Mom… died, while Dirk and Dave had run away from home—”

“Why?”

“Huh?”

“Why did they run away?” Jude repeats, curiosity restoked, and Roxy would simply love to kick herself out of this conversation they’re having. She opts for stalling with a drawled out sigh, trying to work out what tidbits of information her brothers would be okay with her sharing, that is to say most likely none.

“Did you like your dad?” she settles for in the end. Jude makes a pensive little sound that shouldn’t belong in the mouth of any small child being asked that question.

“Dunno,” he says, “I don’t remember him much. Joey hated him.”

Roxy hums, cards her fingers through his hair and makes a mental note of giving him a haircut one of these days. “That’s the same for Dirk and Dave.”

For a moment Jude contemplates what she’s just told him in silence, probably double-checking for plot holes since he seems to love those so much, then he nods like he’s put his seal of approval on Roxy’s watered down truth.

Before he can ask any more uncomfortable questions Roxy continues with the story. “Then Jake and Jade found them living off berries in a forest nearby and dragged them here to us, where we all had our tearful reunion after realizing we were long lost siblings. The end.”

Jude has the nerve, or the decency, to give her a round of applause and Roxy lets herself relax for the first time in too long. She loves her kids, sue her.

When she hears Jude’s little voice say, “I’m happy to be a lost child,” she only cries a bit.

 

 

ix. joey claire, extraordinaire

 

She adjusts the ribbon on top of Maplehoof’s head one last time, hopefully. It matches the flashy dress Kanaya’s made her for the occasion and the way the fabric shimmers when she moves is enough to make it up for all the standing still she had to endure during the measurements and sewing process. Who knew that could be such a hassle? Not Joey for sure.

“You look so pretty,” she tells Maplehoof in encouragement. It’s nice to see her wool all fluffy and brushed up, she usually hates it when Joey tries to perform basic maintenance on her. Maplehoof bleats in her most eloquent fashion.

From the other side of the curtains she can hear Kanaya walking up to the impromptu stage she and the others have built in the middle of the town and her stomach does a quadruple pirouette. It’s time.

“And now, ladies and gentlemen, welcome our new rising star, Joey Claire!” Kanaya’s voice booms, half drowned out by what sounds like hands clapping, and Joey thinks of her mother for a second, before walking through the curtains and greeting her audience.

"Hello!” she says, trying to make her voice sound louder with her belly the way Kanaya’s taught her. She can see all of her family sitting in the front rows: Jade’s fidgeting, Roxy looks like she’s ready to burst in an explosion of confetti and Dave’s got his pokegrub set on recording mode, which means Joey has to fight off the instinct to leap down the stage and tell him to stop being such a mushy sap behind his dumb sunglasses. Gig’s up anyway, Strider.

Instead she turns to Maplehoof, does a curtsy and says, “light screen!”

A sheen the shape of a dome materializes around Maplehoof and Joey grins wide at how nice it looks already.

“Now use confuse ray!”

Maplehoof bleats again and suddenly the inside of the dome lights up in a display of pale, purple light floating around in it and bouncing off the walls at a lazy pace. It’s kind of hypnotic to watch and Joey was worried it might end up affecting her pokemon (or the audience, yikes), but the noises of amazement she gets from the crowd are enough to reassure her, plus she and Maplehoof have been _practicing_ this stuff.

She lets the light show linger for just a little longer, then shouts, “power gem, then discharge!”

From where she’s standing at the feet of the stage Kanaya flashes her a proud smile, but Joey doesn’t have time to smile back because a beam of bright energy shoots up in the sky, cracking the dome like it’s made of glass, and the next moment Maplehoof’s discharge is tearing through the rest of it with an explosion that leaves the screen particles suspended mid air in a glittery cloud. Then it all dissolves.

Reality is kind of a blur for Joey Claire at the moment, again, but not in the disorienting way. Her ears are ringing from the loud cheers, the applause (she thinks someone might be hollering?), and her eyes are still squinting because of the bright flash of light and her mind feels like it’s floating, but it’s perfect.  
She couldn’t be happier.

**Author's Note:**

> i have so many ideas about this AU please hmu on [twitter](https://twitter.com/prankloops) or [curiouscat](https://curiouscat.me/soleiltxt) slash [tumblr](http://rokujouasahi.tumblr.com/) if ur shy and have any questions or just wanna know stuff like backstory or pkmn teams! love u!


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